Power and Abuse

Vicky Featherstone

The year begins with the news that Vicky Featherstone - Artistic Director of the Royal Court - is the "most powerful person in British Theatre".  At least according to The Stage, which publishes an annual list of the "top 100".  In all fairness, I should say that it uses the term "influential", rather than "powerful': but the fundamental point would still seem to be that these are the people who can make and break careers.  Which makes it feel rather paradoxical when you look at the reasons behind the choice of Vicky for the "top spot".  Almost all the coverage, and the judges' own citations, are about the stand she took on sexual harassment in the theatre, in the wake of the scandals around Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Max Stafford-Clark etc.  Surely the whole point of these scandals was that they centred on men in positions of "power" (or "influence", if you prefer - theatre careers often develop through "influence"), who made use of those positions for their own sexual gratification?  Surely, if this calls anything into question, it is the very existence of the power structures that make this behaviour not only possible but endemic?

What Vicky did in response to the scandal seemed to me the opposite of "powerful".  She made the space of the Royal Court available for people to speak with impunity about their experiences.  She then made an ill-judged decision to pull Rita, Sue and Bob Too out of the Royal Court's programme on the grounds of its vague association with Max Stafford-Clark - a decision that she then reversed in response to public criticism.  I think she was right to reverse the decision; and that it takes a lot of bravery to admit, so very publicly, to having made an error of judgement.  Is that "powerful"?  Not in any conventional sense.  You wouldn't catch Harvey Weinstein backing down in public, would you?

And this seems to me to go to the heart of it.  Theatre should not be about "power" and "influence" at all.  It should be about talent, creativity, collaboration, and a sensitive, nuanced response to the complexities of the current moment. Such responses are achieved through open discussion and considered debate, not through "executive decisions". My friend Donatella Barbieri gave me a copy of Mary Beard's Women and Power for Christmas - and it's worth quoting at length:

"[We are] still treating power as something elite, coupled to public prestige, to the individual charisma of so-called 'leadership', and often... to a degree of celebrity.  [We are] also treating power very narrowly, as an object of possession that only the few - mostly men - can own or wield...  On those terms, women as a gender - not as some individuals - are by definition excluded from it.  You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.  That means thinking about power differently.  It means decoupling it from public prestige.  It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers and not just of leaders."

This is how theatre works when it is truly meaningful, and not just a career ladder to pointless stardom.  But the journey towards that new and better way of the art form operating in society will not be helped by the perpetuation of The Stage's "power list".  Let's just scrap it, shall we?

And brava Vicky Featherstone, for suggesting better ways.

Truth and Reconciliation

debbie tucker green's new play at the Royal Court is a brilliant piece of work. I've always liked her writing - stoning mary was another beautiful play - but this time she combines her characteristic poetic language and provocative stance with an amazing manipulation of space which makes the play speak with great immediacy. When you first enter the room, the audience chairs are distributed around the playing area (theatre-in-the-round, basically). You have to choose where to sit with care. A lot of the chairs have reserved notices on them - often saying things like "Victim's Family" or "Witnesses" - which lead you to believe they will be used in the performance, although in fact many are not. Every chair has the name of a victim from a recent conflict carved onto the seat. The chair I sat on had the name and dates of a little girl from Bosnia, killed in her first decade. It was, to say the least, discomforting. On Friday night, there were also surtitles for the hard of hearing, so another factor around justice and its relationship to where you sit came into play.

What was so exciting about all of this was how it blended into the performance itself. The first line referred to the hardness of the chairs for the families coming to a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The mother of a victim felt unable to sit in the room while she waited for the perpetrators. How people sat in relation to one another, how this reflects power structures and power struggles, became integral to the performance. There's been much talk of the theatricality of such events - and now the links were made explicit, implicating us as an audience in the reality of the political and moral crises under exploration.

Only two characters ever got to sit in the centre of the stage - and they were both ghosts. A Rwandan man and the South African child whose mother refused to take a chair. They were evoked to speak to those who had killed them, those whom they haunted, those who knew exactly how they died. But, even at the centre of the stage, they could not speak directly to those they had left behind and who were desperate for knowledge of them.

Now or Later

I went to the Royal Court last night, to see Now or Later by Christopher Shinn. It's a bit Shavian... characters who serve primarily as mouthpieces for political viewpoints - but the acting (especially from a wonderful young actor called Eddie Redmayne) is so engaging and so vulnerable that you get drawn into them as emotional human beings anyway. It's set on the night of the US Presidential election - and it seems to be now, except that the successful Democratic candidate is very different from Obama, whatever the poster image may suggest. Eddie plays his gay son, who has been photographed dressed as Mohammad at a party... with the obvious embarrassment factor when photos and video crop up on blogs.

Nancy Crane, who was in Dis-Orientations and will be coming to Shanghai to work on the Trilogy in February, plays the new President's wife. She's costumed as a cross between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, complete with a product on her hair which she tells me is called "helmet head". Apparently politico women really do use this stuff. Nancy says that the Prime Minister and Sarah Brown came to see the play on Friday. Sarah, unlike the American political wives, has "no mask", she says. Nancy asked her whether she'd enjoyed the play: she said it was just nice to get out of Downing Street at the moment.... which you can understand!